Battleship Command

A niche almost nobody else is filling

Naval-sim fans have spent years getting new entries in the submarine genre — Silent Hunter, UBOAT, Cold Waters, Sea Power, War on the Sea — but surface capital ships have been comparatively starved of attention, and Battleship Command's entire pitch is built around closing that gap. It puts the player aboard the German battleship Scharnhorst, walking her decks in first-person between stations, personally working gunnery, radar, and navigation while commanding a wider fleet through convoy raids across the Atlantic, Arctic, and Mediterranean. Reviewer after reviewer frames the game in exactly these terms: one wrote they'd been "waiting for a game exactly like this for a very long time," describing it as a natural combination of Silent Hunter 5, UBOAT, and War on the Sea, but for the surface fleet instead of the deep. Another reviewer traced a personal lineage all the way back to Destroyer on the Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s, through Great Naval Battles and every Silent Hunter entry, calling Battleship Command the clear next step in that specific lineage. A third, having grown up on Silent Hunter III, called it a direct answer to a wish they'd held since their teenage years, and said they could recommend buying it "without hesitation."

That specificity of comparison matters. This isn't a case of reviewers reaching for the nearest genre label — it's a fanbase that has spent decades tracking a particular, narrow lineage of naval simulations, and largely agreeing that Battleship Command is the first real attempt at the surface-fleet equivalent of what Silent Hunter did for submarines. One review even joked that a modding scene, if it develops, could make this "the Silent Hunter of the surface."

Manual gunnery is the standout, but the sailing itself disappoints

The strongest, most consistently repeated praise centres on the fire-control systems: manually calculating firing solutions, working range-finders, and landing shots on moving targets is described by multiple reviewers as genuinely satisfying once mastered. One reviewer went as far as suggesting the game "should be called fire control simulator," noting that its core loop — calculating shots yourself or handing them to an assisted system — carries the whole experience even in its current bare-bones state, "if you have an imagination."

The sailing simulation underneath that gunnery loop is where the harshest, most specific complaints land. One detailed negative review put it bluntly: "it needs a lot of work to be even called a simulation. As it stands right now, it's more akin to a shore battery shoot-a-duck, because the ships rather move on rails than sail on water." The same review notes that high waves have little visible effect on how ships handle, undercutting the sense of genuinely fighting the sea alongside the enemy. Multiple reviewers separately report that enemy cargo ships absorb an oddly excessive number of hits before sinking, which drags out encounters that should feel decisive. AI convoy behaviour draws similar complaints — one reviewer specifically called out that "your convoy doesn't listen to commands" and that escorted float planes don't reliably perform their intended role.

Real bugs and thin mission variety

Beyond the handling model, several reviewers flag concrete technical problems. One described the game as having "graphical errors" severe enough to undercut even passive enjoyment, while a different reviewer reported a screen-obscuring white overlay bug that made it hard to see the ship at all on joining a session. Visuals more broadly are called "washed out" and dated by more than one critical reviewer, with one going so far as to say the graphics "need work to get it out of what looks like a game that came out 20+ years ago" — a harsh read, but one echoed independently by multiple other negative reviews rather than an isolated complaint.

Mission content is the other recurring soft spot. Several reviewers, comparing the game directly against Cold Waters, Sea Power, and War on the Sea, describe the current mission roster as short, similar to one another, and limited in number — reasonable to expect from a game only weeks into Early Access, but a real gap for anyone buying in at full price expecting a robust campaign right away. One reviewer summarised the state of the game plainly as "quite good. BUT it feels very unfinished... buttons that don't do anything," which is a fair characterisation of where the build currently sits: promising foundational systems, without yet enough content or polish layered on top of them.

A revived publisher name and a price that assumes commitment

MicroProse Software's name carries real weight for exactly this audience — it's the studio behind decades of classic strategy and simulation titles, revived in recent years to back smaller developers working in that same lineage, and its involvement here reads as a deliberate signal to naval-sim veterans rather than a generic publishing deal. That said, $24.99 is a notably higher entry point than most Early Access titles this fleet covers, and it's a price that assumes buyers are committing to support ongoing development rather than paying for a complete package today. The patch history backs up that framing: build updates arrive frequently and are named and versioned in a way that suggests a genuinely active, ongoing development cadence rather than a project coasting on launch buzz — recent builds have added systems like damage control and engine management on top of the base gunnery loop. Whether that activity closes the gaps reviewers are flagging now is the real open question for anyone weighing the price against the current state of the build.

Verdict

Battleship Command is chasing a niche that has gone almost entirely unaddressed on Steam, and the strength and specificity of its positive reviews — from naval-sim veterans who have tracked this exact lineage of games for decades — suggests it's onto something real with its core gunnery and fire-control loop. But this is genuinely early Early Access: the underlying sailing simulation currently feels more scripted than physical, missions are thin and repetitive, and there are real, specific bugs affecting visuals and basic visibility. Recommended for the specific audience who already loves this narrow genre and wants to support a promising foundation through its rough early stretch; everyone else should wait for a few more build cycles before boarding.